Post got et.
“…You were saying?” asked Oxman, an hour later. Quietly. While constantly tracking the area around their new, impromptu hidey-hole.
The human corpses had been noticeably fresher than the deer — fresh enough to still be stiff, if only enough bones had still been in one piece. There had been six of them, probably. At least, Oxman had counted six heads, and there was enough bits of splintered and rotting flesh left to make that particular math work out. But it wasn’t in any way a cheerful scene. Most of the bits were on the ground, or smeared across trees, and one luckless bastard looked like something had tried to punch a hole through his body, credibly enough to count.
Both men immediately understood that all of this absolutely wasn’t the work of a bear or gryphon; you only got that kind of malevolence and violence from sapient creatures. A half-mythical Old American observer would have wondered if the victims had been attacked by grenades, or possibly a claymore mine, but neither Nat or Oxman had any real references for that kind of carnage. Instead they both filed the atrocity under ‘monster attack,’ which is why they were now hunkered down in some convenient underbrush. It was probably coming back